Taking Myself to Dinner

This is a short writing exercise from an advanced creative writing course I am taking with one of my favorite professors at UTA. The prompt was "take yourself on a date." It was really unique and I ended up having a lot of fun with it. 

Taking Myself to Dinner 

She was ten minutes late. I was standing against one of the restaurant’s walls, tapping my foot and nibbling my thumbnail out of habit. “Hey. Did you get lost?” I asked, hoping my smile looked genuine. This girl had misted into my life one day and I’d hardly noticed. What exactly was I doing here, on a date with her?

    ”Kind of. I’ve never been here.”

    “What, did you just get out of the office?” I wondered if she could feel her glasses slipping down her face. She didn’t bother fixing them. We work in the same building, but our schedules are incongruent. It’s a miracle this date even made it out of the planning phase at all. 

    “No, I came down from the courthouse.” She walked past me, opening up the restaurant door for the both of us. “I changed my name.”

    “Wait, what?”

    “I changed my name,” she repeated, a bit louder the second time. I looked for any signs that she could be joking on her face, but I didn’t find any. The sun had just gone down, relegating the duty of illuminating the world to streetlights. A hostess sat us down in a booth seat next to a window, at my request. 

    “So,” I began after we had each ordered our meals, “What’s your name now?” I took a sip from my glass of water with a paper straw after stirring it around.

    “It’s Ash.” 

    “Huh.” I nodded slightly, pretending I understood. She was Ashley. Or had been, I guess. What was the point in cutting it down by three letters? “Think it’ll be a pain changing the name on your documents that have your old name on it?”

    “God, I hope not. I hate paperwork.”

    “But you work in an office,” I pointed out, as if she didn’t know.

    “Can I say something? I think it's not for me. I’ve been on LinkedIn every day this week.”

    “Why not?” Like any other office job, there wasn’t much to complain about aside from tired fingers and sore asses. These were the kinds of problems I felt lucky to be having in the years I’d worked there. 

    She leaned back in her seat and let a few seconds hang in the air, preparing her answer. “I’ve had a ton of different jobs before. I got used to jumping from place to place, trying out new things.”

    “That doesn’t look good on a resume,” I said on instinct.

    “Haha, I guess not.” She didn’t seem to be bothered by my statement. “I don’t let that stop me. If I did, I would be miserable. I know it’s strange, but if I don’t like it, I can’t stay. I get an urge to keep moving on to whatever is next.” She started folding a white napkin in half, then in half again. “It sounds impulsive, doesn’t it?”

    “Well, you have your reasons...” I trailed off and took another long sip of water.

    She laughed, the short, musical ring of it flowing without effort. “You’re totally judging me. It’s alright, though. I tend to let at least some compulsion drive me. Makes it all the more exciting.”

    I almost chuckled at that. “You try to make your job searches exciting?”

    “Everything is boring enough as it is. I have a few more jobs I’d like to try out before settling on one.”

    “Yeah? What are they?” The hostess set down our food at the table, and I listened to her list while I cut into the steak I’d gotten for myself.

    “I want to work at a country club. The history museum downtown. There's a small art therapy center that’s looking for hires, um… Maybe a tour guide at a haunted house.”

    I pursed my lips. “How’d you end up at an office? It doesn’t sound like your style.”

    “I needed to know for sure,” she said.

    That was all there was to it. There was no audible doubt in her voice. She embraced her wild ambitions the same way I embraced the security of an office job. We both started eating in comfortable silence, and I couldn’t help but think to myself: “This girl has it all figured out.”